5 Questions With a Health Economist

What drew you to economics, and to the economics of health care in particular?

As an undergraduate, I realized that economics was at the intersection of my interests in math and policy. Then, as a graduate student in economics, I became interested in how digitization might reshape the nature of work. There was a unique opportunity to study that question in health care, because we could see what doctors were doing, measure when IT systems were implemented, and consider how that changed the nature of work and the care that was delivered. I pivoted into health economics in order to be able to look at that question and never left.

Are there common misconceptions that people have about health economics?

One is that health economists only care about how much care costs. It’s really bigger than that. However much we’re spending, we want to make sure that we’re getting the most benefit for people from that spending. There can be real trade-offs between spending more on health and spending more on education or on other things that people need. So the question is, how do we organize a health care system to maximize benefit?

You’re coming at this with an economic background. What is it like to talk to clinicians about your research?

One of the great things about working at HMS is that there are many smart doctors who are often considering the same problems that I’m interested in but coming at them from a different perspective. I’ve found a lot of value in collaborating and discussing ideas with them. In many cases, getting their understanding of clinical decision-making and the medical science is really important to informing the research and making sure that I am measuring the right outcomes and focused on aspects of the problem that are important to practitioners.

What is one book you’d recommend to someone who wants to gain a better understanding of health economics?

There are a lot of great books. But one that I would recommend is Random Acts of Medicine by some of my colleagues in health care policy, Anupam Jena and Christopher Worsham. It’s a really nice introduction to how we can use some of the tools of empirical economics to think about questions in health care.

What’s the last thing you watched, read, or listened to that stayed with you?

I recently read Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn and his new sequel, Long Island. They’re beautiful books, highlighting the sort of sliding-door choices that people make in life and the way that those choices and the consequences are shaped by social constraints and a good deal of chance.

Amos Esty is the editor of Harvard Medicine.